His sudden unemployment may have caused him to regret having turned down Yale’s offer of a teaching position in 1956. But five years as a graduate student had given him, as he put it in the introduction to “The New Journalism,” “a fierce and unnatural craving for something else entirely. Chicago, 1928, that was the general idea … Drunken reporters out on the ledge of the News peeing into the Chicago River at dawn … Nights down at the saloon listening to ‘Back of the Yards’ being sung by a baritone who was only a lonely blind bulldyke with lumps of milkglass for eyes …”

So he had apprenticed as a reporter at the Springfield (Mass.) Union and then worked as a reporter and Latin American correspondent at the Washington Post, winning Washington Newspaper Guild awards but chafing under the Post system. As he told a Newsweek reporter, “I didn’t subscribe to the theory that every documented sparrow that falls within our circulation area you have to write about.”

His ambitions brought him to the Herald Tribune, where he hoped to further develop his style. But now with the strike on he needed work. Editor Byron Dobell of Esquire agreed to send Wolfe to California to write about the hot rod culture.

Wolfe was about to explode over America. He was about to appear in the heavens like a clean-shaven Jehovah throwing down electrically charged trochaic hammerlines of sheer ecstatic vision and pure hippie grace! Soon it would be: Wake up, America! Tom Wolfe is here! Banging on the dean’s door with a dandy’s cudgel in his ivory three-piece suit like a Mercury astronaut intubated with 50 centileters of Old Granddad, tearing through journalism’s sleepy hollow of leather club chairs and Connecticut train schedules like a Virginia frat boy channeling Alexis de Tocqueville, yelling, “Wake up, you sleeping-beauty three-dot phone-fed so-called journalists dreaming of a publicist’s underwear! Wake up you Rogaine revolutionaries and J. Crew flannel worshippers from your sleep of MFA sinecures with your Lands’ End picnic baskets full to bursting with Harry and David organic fruits grown by nervous Northern California neo-botanists with great skin who in an honester age would have lined up outside Ye Olde Leeches and Bloodletting Parlor for the requisite Middle Ages pageboy and signed on for the Crusades! Wake up, everybody! Tom Wolfe is here!”

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. In this story we’re telling it was still 1963 and the not-yet-famous, out-of-work Wolfe went to California for Esquire to check out the car scene and ran up a $750 tab at the Beverly Wilshire and came back to New York with copious notes but no story.

American-studies Ph.D. with X-ray eyes meets nitro Neanderthals squatting by the drag strip of our last frontier, discovers autonomous youth culture never before possible in the history of the world except now with unprecedented post-WWII world hegemony and unparalleled productive capacity!

But he can’t write the darn thing.

Wolfe is down! Crawling toward the enemy pillbox like a “Sgt. Rock” G.I. with nothing left but the grit in his belly and the fire in his heart! He calls his editor at Esquire on the walkie talkie:

“Byron … Sarge … Can’t … finish … article. Take … my … facts … finish … story.”

“You can do it,” Dobell says.

“Can’t … finish … story,” says Wolfe. “Here … take … my … notes.”

“OK, have it your way,” Dobell tells him. Just type up the notes, and they’ll have somebody else write it up. “I’ll see you around Sports Afield-freelancer 5-cents-a-word part-time Yellow Cab-driving hell, boy!”

Wolfe starts typing a memo at 8 p.m.: “Dear Byron …” By midnight he has 20 pages. He turns on WABC and starts listening to rock ‘n’ roll and keeps writing.

“I wrapped up the memorandum about 6:15 a.m., and by this time it was 49 pages long,” he later wrote. “I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30 a.m. About 4 p.m. I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were striking out the ‘Dear Byron’ at the top of the memorandum and running the rest of it in the magazine.”

“The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby” became the title piece of Wolfe’s first book, a collection of 22 magazine and newspaper pieces published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1965. In addition to the introduction that described how Esquire came to publish a “Dear Byron” memo as a piece of journalism, it contained such pieces as “The New Art Gallery Society,” “The Nanny Mafia,” “The Girl of the Year,” “Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!!” and “Why Doormen Hate Volkswagens.” Taken together, the pieces encapsulated the themes, mannerisms and obsessions that would play out over the next 35 years, not only in his journalism but in his novels.

He started doing crazy stuff. He started one story about the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village like this: “Hai-ai-ai-ai- i-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- i-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- i-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai- ai-aireeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

And this is how he started “Girl of the Year,” about society “It” girl Jane Holzer at a Rolling Stones concert:

Bangs mains bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms eclair shanks elf boots ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them, these flaming little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the Academy of Music Theater underneath that vast old mouldering cherub dome up there — aren’t they super-marvelous!

He was appropriating the upper-class literary tools of fiction and poetry and using them to ornament his lower-class magazine and newspaper journalism. It was as though he was using the good silver to slop the hogs. In American literary culture, all hell broke loose.

In 1965, Wolfe attacked the New Yorker magazine with two articles of historical significance that will be anthologized for the first time in “Hooking Up,” a collection of nonfiction and fiction that Wolfe’s longtime publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, will publish in the fall. They are currently available only in back issues of New York magazine, which was then the Sunday supplement of the Herald Tribune: “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” and “Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker-II.”

Blam blam! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Wolfe single-handedly wipes out machine gun nest of tired feature writers encamped in New Yorker magazine bunker! No more narcoleptic pseudo-objective institutional blow-job dispatches, no more sycophantic formulaic post-hypnotic feature writing! No more navel-gazing pasty-faced bad-faith “novelists” writing book-length crossword puzzles! It’s time to put your boots on your feet and your reporter’s notebook in your back pocket and stride out into the open American air and write about what the hell is really going on in this country!

Roused from Urizenic sleep, Dwight McDonald, New Yorker staff writer and patriarch of the literati, retaliated with “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine,” and “Parajournalism II: Wolfe and The New Yorker”! Renata Adler and Gerald Jonas joined in, citing: Factual errors! But Wolfe said he put them in on purpose! Attack Tom Wolfe! Kill Tom Wolfe! Manhattan aflame with literary envy and spite. Streets clogged with bile! Vindictiveness backs up subway! But Wolfe won’t quit!

“As the most spectacular journalist in years,” gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote, “Wolfe caused severe jealousy and outrage pangs throughout the U.S. literary establishment when he sprang right out of Pop Culture’s forehead to become a star practically overnight. Seldom has anyone seen such visceral envies, such backbiting bitchiness, such voodoo malevolence directed at any writer — especially after he took on the New Yorker magazine.”

Over the next few years, the existence of New Journalism was debated as fervently as the existence of God. Articles such as “Is there a New Journalism?”; “The ‘Old’ New Journalism”; “New Journalism Now”; “Bad Writing and the New Journalism”; and “Want to See New Journalism in Newspapers? Well, Don’t Hold Your Breath” appeared in journals of the trade such as Quill and the Columbia Journalism Review.

In 1973, Wolfe published “The New Journalism,” a collection of examples of the art by Terry Southern, Rex Reed, Hunter S. Thompson and others. In its introduction he made a lucid and cogent argument for writers to turn away from introspection and to make the observable, reportable world the source of their art.

The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity,” he wrote. “The material is merely his clay, his palette … Even the obvious relationship between reporting and the major novels — one has only to think of Balzac, Dickens, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and, in fact, Joyce — is something that literary historians deal with only in a biographical sense. It took the New Journalism to bring this strange matter of reporting into the foreground.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
-

Wolfe has such a way of stirring things up that one cannot help picturing him getting his share of St. Christopher’s School thumpings as a high school kid in Richmond, Va. After all, he co-edited the newspaper and chaired the student council. Who wouldn’t want to smack him? And just look at those supercilious, smirking, smart-ass Tory eyes, that high, aristocratic forehead, the lock of WASPish flaxen hair inviting those who don’t know opera to play knuckle sonatas on his porcelain chin.

The Richmond he was born in in 1931 may have been too polite for such things, and his parents, Helen Hughes and Thomas Kinnerly Wolfe Sr. — his dad an agronomist who taught at Virginia Polytechnic and edited a journal called the Southern Planter — may have been the Ward and June Cleavers of their time. It may even be that he safely navigated the deeply conservative, all-male Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va., where in his time one was still required to wear a tie to class (the son of a student there at the time says Wolfe wore bow ties), pitching on the baseball team, being sports editor of the school newspaper and co-founding the literary quarterly Shenandoah without so much as one session of boot-heel chiropractic. But his contrarian impulse and his genius for mockery backed by uncanny accuracy must have infuriated his peers as it later infuriated America’s literary and artistic establishments.

Be that as it may, Wolfe dismisses his own childhood as routine, claiming, “I was lucky, I guess, in my family in that they had a very firm idea of roles: Father, Mother, Child. Nothing was ever allowed to bog down into those morass-like personal hang-ups. And there was no rebellion. The main thing about childhood was to get out of it.”

After a failed tryout as a pitcher with the old New York Giants at age 21, he took with him to Yale and then to Manhattan what Liz Smith, writing in Status magazine in 1966, called “the Virginia-born resentment of the entire Eastern Seaboard clique’s old leftover FDR liberalism and snobbism.”

It was that keen awareness of class and status that he carried into everything he wrote. Moreover, the way his youth put a stamp on his writing provides not only a useful magazine-style transition here from the requisite little early-life bio section, but may indeed say something about why many believe Wolfe’s talents are misused in the novel.

As he noted at the time with what seemed ironic distance but turned out to eerily prefigure his own career, “The Novel seemed like one of the last of those superstrokes, like finding gold or striking oil, through which an American could, overnight, in a flash, utterly transform his destiny.” He says elsewhere in the same piece, “At this late date — partly due to the New Journalism itself — it’s hard to explain what an American dream the idea of writing a novel was in the 1940s, the 1950s, and right into the early 1960s. The Novel was no mere literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon. It was a cortical fever.”

At its best, Wolfe’s journalism sizzles with a quality of stunned amazement distilled into keen eloquence. At its worst, his fiction is bloated, overbearing and boring. After he published “The Right Stuff,” which many consider to be his best nonfiction work, Wolfe published “In Our Time,” a coffee table book; “The Painted Word,” an attack on the pretensions of modern art; “From Bauhaus to Our House,” a screed on modern architecture; and the collection of articles “The Purple Decades: A reader,” before turning to fiction and publishing, in 1987, the blockbuster novel that became a Hollywood movie, “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Since that time Wolfe has been apparently trying to demonstrate, by doing it himself, that realistic fiction is the future of American literature. In 1998 he released his second gargantuan novel, “A Man in Full.”

Norman Mailer took up five extra-large New York Review of Books pages to agonize over “A Man in Full” and to say that it was better than “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (which is saying what, precisely?) while at the same time comparing it to making love with a fat lady — “Once she gets on top, it’s over.”

Mailer also offered thoughts on why Wolfe is such a fine writer of nonfiction and such a flawed novelist:

Can one say that his strength as a journalist contributes to his weakness as a novelist? It is likely. He was so good as a young reporter that he was promoted to feature writer. But even in the upper reaches of feature writing, you still move on quickly to another subject, another set of people … He spent his early professional life writing too quickly and moving on … Can we offer a final verdict? Tom may be the hardest-working showoff the literary world has ever owned.

When Wolfe occasionally returns to the practice of journalism, as he did with “The Artist the World Couldn’t See,” a recent New York Times magazine article, his fans still hope to see the insouciant fire and wit that made pieces like “Radical Chic” and “The Pumphouse Gang” such an effervescent pleasure. (For the title piece of his new “Hooking Up” collection, his publisher reports, Wolfe immersed himself in the subculture of American teens and reports on their sexual rites with the clinical precision ornamented by baroque flourishes for which he is justly famous. We are also told that according to Wolfe, today’s youths define “second base” as oral sex.)

But just as often, we are disappointed. In scolding the art world for ignoring sculptor Frederick Hart, who died at 55 a public success and a critical nonentity, Wolfe predictably ascribes Hart’s obscurity to that putative art-world cabal described in “The Painted Word” and “From Bauhaus to Our House,” whose high crimes include the promotion of abstract painting and the erection of modern buildings. But, as a letter writer responds, “The art world ignores Frederick Hart’s sculpture, not because of the formal nature of his art but because his sculpture, remarkably skilled though it may be, seldom, if ever, rises above the slick and sentimental.”

But above all, when Wolfe hectors us about our failure to grasp the importance of social realism and the centrality of status seeking in American life, he doesn’t entertain us. It’s no fun. Maybe we’re dolts, asses and twits; maybe we’re lazy and narrow and weak; maybe we need to be educated by Mr. Wolfe. But all we want is to have some fun! He used to entertain us and he doesn’t anymore.

The value of “The Painted Word” and “From Bauhaus to Our House” is that by example Wolfe gives us courage to question an orthodoxy that has kept undeservedly long the mantle of the iconoclastic. If read a certain way, those books can reinvigorate our relations to art. We need the courage to trust our own responses, to resist the social pressure to praise what leaves us cold and feign indifference to work from which we secretly derive some warm, sustaining pleasure. What can make Wolfe’s bellowing about aesthetics tiresome, however, is that while directing us to seek more authentic aesthetic experiences, he himself lapses from art into polemic. Having given in to the urge to be right, he has forsaken that loftier job of the writer, which is to be intellectually beguiling in a way so complex as to awaken the soul’s delight.

And Wolfe’s fiction, too, seems meant less as an expression of his own aesthetic powers and more as Exhibits A and B in his voluminous brief against modern novels. While “The Bonfire of the Vanities” was a commercial success, it lacked the stylistic power and sizzle of his journalism. Ditto with “A Man in Full,” 1998′s rotund tome set in Atlanta, despite its remarkable 1.2 million initial hardback press run. Wolfe simply does not seem to be a great novelist. He is absolutely right about the necessity of looking at the surfaces of American life, but in the process of telling us that, he disregards the surfaces of his own prose. When Wolfe wrote his great stuff about cars, when he wrote “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” his prose had a shimmer in the details because he was celebrating the power of surfaces both in the world and in his writing.

What can you do? Gather below his New York apartment with megaphones and hector: Bad Tom Wolfe! Stop Writing Fiction! Bad Tom Wolfe!

Apply tough love? “Dammit, soldier, get out there and report! Tell us how we live today! Make us hear it, touch it, smell it, see it, taste it! Make us feel it!”

Don’t be ridiculous.

For fans who love and respect the early journalism of Tom Wolfe, the only thing to be done, aside from looking eagerly forward to “Hooking Up,” is to recognize that Wolfe is onto something else now. Like it or not, leave it at that. Perhaps for his forthcoming collection, he will have occasionally dipped his pen into the ink of the gods.

Rather than petulance and stridency, the proper stance is a studied and patient distance.

Can you do a good insouciant shrug?

Good. Let’s all do one big therapeutic insouciant shrug together on the count of three:

One.

Two.

Three.

SHRUG!

Yeah, I know this isn’t all my fault, that it takes two to make a bad relationship, and all that. And certainly there are women — most of them — who wouldn’t even look my way. Great for them. But for those who are willing to look my way, don’t I have a basic human obligation to keep them safe from my horribleness and inevitable failures? Without exception I say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing or just collapse.

So. Given that I contribute nothing to the world but disappointment and misery, and I can’t control my desire for companionship and attention, shouldn’t I just kill myself? Isn’t that the moral thing to do at this point?

A Dangerous Nothing

Dear Dangerous Nothing,

You, my friend, are exactly perfect the way you are. You’re not a moron!

Look on the bright side: You have a technique. Don’t wait to show her your bumbling, fumbling, weak and incompetent side.  Spill your soup on her now! On the first date. Roll your car over your own foot and have her take you to the emergency room. Come out of the bathroom with tape all over your face. Why? Because a person with tape all over his face looks funny!

It’ll break the ice. She’ll thank you for it!

Pour it on  about what a loser you are! That’ll get her going about how you just have low self-esteem and you’re being too hard on yourself.

If you are asking women to marry you and promising to fly them in your private jet to your villa in Portugal and saying you’ll pick them up at 8 o’clock sharp the next morning and then you are not showing up, then women are going to bed thinking about your private jet and then not getting to ride in it. That’s bad.

You should slap yourself in the face once very hard if you are doing that. Then you should force yourself to sell your imaginary private jet at a loss of millions of imaginary dollars.

But killing yourself wouldn’t make any sense at all, and it wouldn’t make anyone happy, not even you.

Besides, there are worse people.

Thanks!

Dear Cary,

Hmmm. I won’t write this like a writer, more like the utterly confused person I am. I’ll sum up. I’ve been with BF/husband (I didn’t want to get married, he did) 15 years. He came with three daughters, all filling pages of the DSM. One is bipolar, one BDP, one ADHD etc., etc. At the time I was 30 and had just lost both my parents very suddenly, I was making a lot of money, had inherited some and was really trying to pretend nothing had happened. We were great. I still think he’s the funniest human I’ve ever met and that we share that thing all good couples do: We think we’re better than everyone else. Fast forward. His insecurity has dogged us from the beginning. Had I been more aware and noticing, I would likely have run.

Three years ago we lost our dog. He was our child. The one thing we had together. It was bone cancer and it was awful. It probably triggered for me the memory of losing my parents so quickly — I went a little nuts. I had an affair, I left, I ended the affair. I was so fucking sad I couldn’t stand it. I drank a lot.

Meanwhile, I’m a writer. Literary, but not totally insignificant. I’ve been sober for about four months, and working desperately to finish this new book I have due.

A week ago I learned that he was setting me up, saying, “Your phone rang and it was a blocked number, is there anything you want to tell me?” All this involves cappuccino and serious face. When I realized he was making it all up, I lost my mind.

I can’t take it anymore. Every day is a prosecution. There’s more, of course. A lot. I tiptoe around him, he’s angry most of the time and his three grown daughters don’t want to talk to him without a therapist in the room. He’s brilliant and tricky and there is no way to win. I can’t fill the black hole anymore.

And why now, besides the obvious? I’m sober, I’m working, this book is good … why would he tear it out from under me? I know it’s not conscious, but it’s incredibly twisted.

I love him, and we were better than everyone else, but he’s killing me. Dead.

Tormented

Dear Tormented,

You’re four months sober. You’re going to have to take this on faith. Nothing else matters. Nothing is going to be the way it was. There is nothing to do but stay sober. This other stuff will get sorted out later.

Four months sober is its own special condition. It may manifest as confusion or certainty, clarity or dullness, energy or lethargy, high or low, but it is an edge; it is a liminal state out of which a strange future is being born.

You can afford to slow down now and not try to figure everything out or fix everything. It wouldn’t help anyway. Your old fixes won’t work. Well, they might seem to work for a while, but the point is that you need to abandon them because they will not lead you where you have to go now.

No matter whether you finish the book or don’t finish the book, stay married or get divorced, as long as this sobriety goes on day after day you are going to reclaim your life, your childhood, your spirit. You are going to see and feel things that were formerly only a dull buzz or murmur. These dull murmurs of being will provide the sinews of a new construct. It will not be the you that you envisioned when you were busy envisioning yourself. It will be different. But it will be authentic and thus suffused with the energy of life.

Imagine looking at what your husband is doing and not needing to do anything about it.

You will shed many illusions. You will shed the illusion of being better than the rest of us — beneath which has secretly lain the illusion that you are worse than us. These troubling illusions of separateness and hierarchy will go away and you will be reunited with humanity on an even footing.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life.

Your husband and others will attempt to get back the old you who would engage their craziness. Observe this from a safe distance. Don’t engage their craziness. Stay safe in your four months of sobriety. Finish the book. Take long walks.

Your husband has lost you. You are no longer entertaining him in his madness. So he is reaching out to you. He is trying to get you back.

Don’t go there. You will just have to stand firm.

Guard your sobriety as you would guard your life. Finish your book. Take long walks. It will start to make sense.

I do want to marry and have children. Thus I’ve spent a fair amount of time on self-reflection, either on my own, in a therapist’s office, or on the phone with my sister. I’ve spent several years sifting through the finer details of my relationship with my father — yep, he’s emotionally distant and critical, has an on/off problem with alcohol, you know the drill. So now, I have all this knowledge about me, about my relationship with my father, about why I play the role that I do in my relationships, etc., etc. I’m grateful for this knowledge. However, I want this knowledge to do something for me, because, frankly, I’m really starting to bore myself.

Knowing what I know, how can I, or anyone, for that matter, truly change? How do I stop making the same old choices, drawing in the same old men, putting up with the same old crap?

Sincerely,

Ready for Change

Dear Ready for Change,

I only know one thing about this. When you have had enough then you will change.

Have you had enough? Have you truly had enough? Are you stumbling, blind and desperate? Are you lying on the sidewalk? Have you fallen to your knees and cried out to anyone who can hear that you cannot go on one minute more?

Then you will change.

Until then, you may acquire new skills and insights that alert you to your behavior. You may make better decisions. You may abort certain activities. You may begin to see the patterns in your life with greater clarity. You may become more cautious. You may get better at evaluating potential mates.

But you will not change in any fundamental way until you reach a breaking point. This breaking point may not be dramatic or even visible to others. It may be quiet, a moment  when something shifts inside. You may not even realize it at the time. But a transformation is not an adjustment. It is a shift.

Many desire deep, fundamental change, yet it is elusive. Certain life-changing experiences bring us to our core selves, or force us to make certain leaps — leaps of faith, leaps that take us out of the ordinary and expose us to a more authentic and searing experience of the self. But how does that happen? How can we make it happen?

I don’t think we can make it happen. But there are things that seem to predispose us to it.

Having a fatal flaw can be a blessing. Facing it may bring about the change you long for.

For me it was alcoholism.

That is all I know, personally. I have only experienced this once, when my alcoholism brought me to a condition in which I was willing to do the 12 steps. But people have adapted the 12 steps to other conditions. It seems reasonable that certain psychological conditions would produce the same hopelessness and despair that drive people to do the 12 steps.

Those of us who have found lasting help through the 12 steps can usually point to one defining moment. Such moments are usually preceded by years of difficulty and numerous attempts to change without experiencing any major disruptions in life or having to entertain foreign and sometimes empirically questionable notions. What happens in these moments is qualitatively different from the acquisition of new life skills or psychological insights. We had acquired life skills and understanding and insight but still could not stop doing what we were doing.

So I would suggest if you want such an experience that you entertain the notion that you might be one of those people for whom the 12 steps might work even though you do not seem to be an addict. I have heard people speak of being so demoralized by their behaviors that they “hit bottom” with codependence, sex, anger, etc.

It makes sense. It’s not my story, but it makes sense. Why should alcohol have a special place in the mechanics of human transformation? Why would the universal human experience of hitting bottom and reaching out for help and finding a new way of living be confined to addicts? The history of religion and consciousness shows otherwise.

The important point is that transformation is not acquisition; rather, it is loss. We do not pick up new tools for living first; we first abandon what has served us so far, and in that moment between abandoning what has brought us this far and stepping into a new vessel is a moment of profound terror and joy.

That moment of terror is what distinguishes transformation from mere adjustment.

Since you have are standing at a precipice, I suggest you look into the 12 steps as they have been applied to problems of relationship and family. Al-Anon is a group that started to help the family members of alcoholics but has now been found useful for a variety of human problems.

But the steps are just activities; the results can often seem miraculous but I continue to believe that change begins with some ineffable human shift, whether you call it raw desperation, ego deflation, a moment of clarity, incomprehensible demoralization, seeing the light … it doesn’t matter so much what we call it as long as we understand what we are talking about. So the problem remains: How are we brought to this point? How do we arrive at it? Can it be precipitated, like inducing birth?

Perhaps you will be brought to this point by continual meditation on your problem, or by continuing therapy, or by a sudden realization; perhaps it will come to you as nothing more than a passing thought that has lasting resonance. I urge you to begin with the 12 steps and see where that takes you; doing such activities, if nothing else, seems to keep us attuned and alert to the necessary moment, whenever it arrives, and it always arrives in its own time.

My problem is there hasn’t been a night that has gone by that I haven’t had a “nightmare” about this guy. And the new girl. And his parents, whom I adored. A recurring dream is that I move into a new place (which I did already) and I am so excited about it, and then I walk outside, and there they are, my next-door neighbors.

I have been on a couple of dates and met some really nice guys whom I really don’t think twice about.

I know I did the right thing, but I am so embarrassed and annoyed that my subconscious will not let it go. Any suggestions on what it might take to stop these dreams/nightmares?

My subconscious would really appreciate it.

Over It But Not Really Over It

Dear Over It But Not Really,

My subconscious had a conversation with your subconscious and found out that you’re still totally in love with this guy. Your subconscious is, anyway.

Your subconscious was telling my subconscious how attractive he was and what a good time you used to have until the conversation started to really irritate me and I had to break in and say some things to both of them.

“You’re all about you, aren’t you?!” I said to your subconscious. “Here this girl is trying to get over this guy and she’s asking me for help, but you just can’t get enough of him. You keep throwing him right back in her face. What’s wrong with you?”

Now, because my subconscious and your subconscious were speaking to each other in their own special language, I can’t transcribe exactly what your subconscious was saying. But here’s a rough approximation.

“You really loved him, didn’t you?” my subconscious said.  “You really loved him and she ditched him without consulting you. That’s it, isn’t it? You felt comfortable with him screwing up all the time, not being true, not being able to settle down, not telling the truth? How can you love a guy that much who treats her so badly? Aren’t you and she one and the same? Don’t you have any regard for her? You’re just out for a good time and nothing more?

“You don’t care? Really? You’re her subconscious and you don’t really care that much what happens to her? Oh, you don’t mean that you don’t care, but that you don’t take her fears seriously because they’re groundless ego fears? That she’s not really in danger even though she thinks she is? That she doesn’t really have a broken heart even though she’s crying for months? What are you talking about? [Your subconscious can be a little arrogant and obtuse -- like a lot of subconsciouses.] It’s just “ego fear”? Come on. Really?

“So riddle me this, Her Subconscious: Where were you when she was going through all this with this guy? You were right there? Why didn’t you tell her?

“What? You liked it when he wouldn’t behave? You liked the fact that he was out of control? That is crazy! That is perverse!

“Oh. Right. You’re the subconscious. You’re supposed to be crazy and perverse.”

After having this conversation with your subconscious, I understand you much better. Your subconscious loves the jester and the cowboy and the wanderer, who make for sketchy boyfriends but your subconscious doesn’t care. It’s not that your subconscious doesn’t care about you. In fact, you are all it cares about. But it considers many of your fears to be petty, society-based fears, not grounded in spiritual reality. See, your subconscious is coming from a perspective of pretty much timelessness, infinity, no death, that kind of thing. It’s not in a hurry, your subconscious. It’s got loads of time. It always has a parking space.  When it’s just parking, it’s into parking. If it’s making love, it’s just making love. It’s just interested in what’s happening before or afterward or in different locations. That’s meaningless to the subconscious: future, past, here, there — it’s all the same. Plus, when postage rates go up, it doesn’t have to adjust the meter, if you know what I mean. (That’s the most amazing thing of all, if you’re in a small business. But you don’t know what I’m talking about now, do you, because you’re not in a small business? Well, you should be. As a hedge against inflation and joblessness.)

Anyway, this explains why you are in such a tough spot.

So what can you do?

Well, I know one thing. You have to give your subconscious what it wants, or it will make life hell.

Think of your subconscious as if it were a child and you were the adult having to pay its way and drive it around.

It’s like, OK, if it were playing baseball, it would be the one guy out there who is just enjoying the sensation of playing and doesn’t care about the rules or the score; he loves the crack of the bat and the sliding into base; he loves the feel of the clay and the grass; he loves the uniform and being out in the sun and cheering when something happens.

That’s your unconscious, or inner child, or soul, or whatever. That’s the part of you that is alive and hungry.

Your subconscious misses him more than you do. It misses the sweets. It misses the chance to be on top of the world, in the moment, laughing in the bar, completely satisfied. It misses him, how he took care of things for you, how he made things right while he was making things wrong.

Your subconscious knew all along exactly what he was like and what he was doing and that was fine.

You have no secrets from your subconscious. I think that’s where people get the notion of “God” as somehow all-knowing; it’s our projection of our own unconscious.

Your subconscious is pure knowing. It sees and knows and shrugs. It shrugs, that is, as long as it is getting what it wants, for that’s the other part of it: Your subconscious is also pure longing. It doesn’t care about the rules he broke. It just wants him back. And it will keep serving him up in dreams until it gets what it wants, which is … whatever it wants … which it will tell you about in the cryptic and maddening language of dreams and coincidence.

So what are you going to do?

You have to own it, for one thing. You have to own your own desire. You have to say, out loud, here is my desire for that guy, and it is strong, and I do want him, I want the taste of him, I want the feel of him, I want to do the things we used to do, I miss feeling the way I felt after we did the things we did, and I miss knowing that he wanted me and was there, and all the things that happened while we were together.

Your hungers have led you into bliss but also torment. You are a Western person who takes it for granted that you are in charge and that there are rules, and that a lover can strike out if he violates the rules. What you are encountering, though, is the nature of desire and the subconscious, which does not care about rules and the violation of them but only cares about vision and passion and taste and touch and wanting.

Go easy on yourself is one suggestion. Admit that you are not in charge, that your desires are bigger than you. Observe that moving and changing jobs and changing bars did not eliminate the condition of desire. That is because desire does not inhere in conditions or locations. It is in you; it is your desire. It is yours. Own it.

Satisfy it.

We stayed in touch through the breakup process, which crushed him, and we tried to stay friends although it was awkward at times, to say the least. I stupidly thought that I could break apart from him but remain best friends. Everyone says that doesn’t work. He admitted he was wrong to have denied me a commitment. He told me he wanted kids now. He proposed to me, and swore he’d try everything to get me back. I held off, but stayed in touch.

I joined Match.com and went on a series of somewhat lame dates (but I tried not be so hard on them or myself — I hadn’t dated in 10 years!). My ex bought a larger, less flashy car because, he said, “It’ll be good for kids.”

I moved my life to another part of the city. He kept all the pictures of us up in the house.

I told all my girlfriends I was a strong, independent woman now on the prowl and that they should all fix me up. My ex quietly told only those closest to him.

I told him I didn’t see a future with him. He planned a trip for us to go to Napa, and I — needing a break from work and badly wanting to travel with my “old friend” — went.

We had a wonderful time: We ate, tasted wine, walked along the river, laughed, made love. Everything went smashingly well.

Now we secretly meet once or twice a week (when I’m not out on my Match.com dates!). We make dinner at our old house or my new one, and sleep together regularly. I’ve only told a few close friends, because I don’t want to seem like a flip-flopper. But those few close friends aren’t really shocked because they knew how close we were for so long.

This is not characteristic of me. I am known to be a hard-ass. I’m known to make decisions and stick to them. I don’t turn back. I’ve never even fathomed I would write a letter to an advice columnist. I’m the rock everyone usually goes to for advice.

But I’m flat-out still in love with him, although I’m very suspicious of his 180-degree turn in terms of kids and marriage. I don’t want to go back to him and end up playing the fool. On the other hand, I don’t want to lose the person I could live my life with and make a future with.

Is it just the excitement of the thing that’s getting to me, or is this one the real deal? I’m asking you: Can you think of a way I can test him or test myself to know the difference? Please advise.

Hardheaded in Love

Dear Hardheaded in Love,

You want to test him? You just did. He passed. The test is over.

Can you hear him talking? He bought a sedan. He kept all your old pictures up. He proposed.

He’s saying he’s ready. He’s saying he’s changed. He’s saying he doesn’t want to lose you. He’s saying come on, marry me, let’s have kids.

What more can he do?

He doesn’t want anybody else. He wants you. Maybe neither of you realized it but the whole episode sounds like a test.

Pencils down.

Get married. Quick.